www.Sc ient i f icAmerican.com/Mind SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND 23

(illusions)

Afraid of ShadowsSpooky illusions trick and treat your brain

BY STEPHEN L. MACKNIK AND SUSANA MARTINEZ-CONDE

“What difference do it make if

the thing you scared of is real

or not?”

—Toni Morrison

Song of Solomon

HALLOWEEN celebrates illusion. Even

if we manage to ignore lights of fancy

the other 364 days of the year, come

October 31 we set out to enjoy trick-

ery and pretense. We disguise our-

selves, we carve malevolent expres-

sions in bland, innocuous pumpkins

and we do our best to suspend our dis-

belief as we enter supposedly haunted

houses. We become illusion creators as

well as willing victims. We seek fake

fear. But costumes for our masquer-

ades are not the only deceptions that

Halloween brings you. Any emotion

you experience, whether it be fright or

delight, is real only in your mind. In a

neural sense, all of us are afraid of

“ghosts”; we all have irrational fears

that are disconnected from fact (bugs

and small spaces are some of our own

personal phobias). With its harmless

thrills and scares, Halloween pushes

gently on the limits of the reality that

our brain constructs. And one thing

about limits, as Michael Jordan said in

his Hall of Fame induction speech in

2009, is that “like fears, [they] are of-

ten just an illusion.” M

STEPHEN L. MACKNIK and SUSANA

MARTINEZ-CONDE are laboratory directors

at the Barrow Neurological Institute in

Phoenix. They serve on Scientiic American

Mind’s board of advisers and are authors

of Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience

of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday

Deceptions, with Sandra Blakeslee, now in

paperback (http://sleightsofmind.com).

Their forthcoming book, Champions of

Illusion, will be published by Scientific

American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

TRICK-OR-TREATERSIn The Halloween Tree, a 1972 novel by American horror, science-iction and fantasy

writer Ray Bradbury, eight children go trick-or-treating. Can you ind them in the

book’s cover? In this ambiguous illusion, the costumed kids, their props and the

tree in the background form the shape of a skull. Step back from the scene or

squint your eyes if you have trouble seeing the skull. To identify the trick-or treat-

ers, get close again, paying attention to the details in the image. When your per-

ception of an ambiguous image lips back and forth between two possible interpre-

tations, so does the underlying neural activity in the areas of your brain that are

responsible for your experience. CO

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© 2012 Scientific American

www.Sc ient i f icAmerican.com/Mind SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND 25

(illusions)

(Further Reading)

◆ Mind Sights: Original Visual Illusions, Ambiguities, and Other Anomalies, with a Commentary

on the Play of Mind in Perception and Art. R. N. Shepard. W. H. Freeman, 1990.

◆ From Presence to Consciousness through Virtual Reality. M. V. Sanchez-Vives and M. Slater

in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Vol. 6, No. 4, pages 332–339; April 2005.

◆ Ray Villafane’s Pumpkins. R. Villafane. Gibbs Smith, 2012.

OUTRAGEOUS PUMPKINSAmerican sculptor Ray Villa-

fane competed as one of four

professional pumpkin carvers

and bagged the Grand Prize in

the Food Networks’ Chal-

lenge Show, Outrageous

Pumpkins in 2008, and Outra-

geous Pumpkins Challenge II

in 2010. He has since carved

pumpkins around the world,

including in the president’s

White House quarters. For

Halloween 2011 he estab-

lished a new world record for

carving the heaviest pumpkin

ever documented. The beast,

grown by Jim Bryson and his

daughter Kelsey, weighed in

at 1,818.5 pounds. Villafane

sculpted zombies from a

smaller pumpkin (weighing a

mere 1,693 pounds) and

staged them to create the illu-

sion of the living dead burst-

ing out of the colossal squash

pod (far left). See the artist

in action at www.visualnews.

com/2011/10/29/halloween-

worlds-largest-pumpkin-

carving.

ALL IS VANITYAll Is Vanity, an 1892 drawing by

American illustrator C. Allan Gil-

bert, draws on the 16th- and 17th-

century European Vanitas painting

tradition, in which still-life objects

symbolize the transient and mean-

ingless nature of earthly pursuits.

The woman admiring herself in the

mirror does not realize that her bot-

tles of perfume, her makeup table

(also called a vanity), her elegant

gown, even her own youth and

beauty, are leeting illusions. Only

death, represented by the skull en-

guling the scene, is permanent

and real. Last Days of the Sun, by

British sculptor James Hopkins,

puts a contemporary spin on the

Vanitas concept. The seemingly ca-

sual arrangement of rock-star bling

signiies the futility of ephemeral

fame and riches. The skull emerg-

ing from the image provides the set

of items with symbolic meaning.

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© 2012 Scientific American